Rumor: AMD’s Tonga is the answer to Nvidia’s Maxwell

07 July 2014

By Wesley Fick

Whilst Nvidia’s Maxwell family only applies to the GTX750 Ti and the GTX750, it’s not going to be the only one. Later in the year we can expect a complete rollout of GPUs based on the 28-nanometer process, with further tweaks to Maxwell’s architecture to make it even more efficient on larger dies. AMD is set to hit back sooner with Tonga, a revamped version of the Tahiti family that makes up the Radeon HD7870XT, HD7950, HD7970, R9 280 and R9 280X.

Tonga will be a more efficient version of the GCN silicon, with VR-Zone China expecting it to pack in as much power as the R9 280X in the same power envelope as the Radeon R9 270X. VR-Zone reports that the card may have up to 2048 GCN-based stream processors, 128 texture units, 32 ROPs, a 256-bit memory bus and between 2-4GB of GDDR5 memory. With those specs, it’s closer to the Geforce GTX760, which is a cut-down, more efficient version of the GTX680.